GUS GRISSOM, ONE of the Original Seven astronauts, sneaked forbidden food into a spacecraft twice in his life as an astronaut. The first time was a joke; the second time was a forewarning.
The time it was a joke, the contraband was a corned beef sandwich, which Wally Schirra had bought two days earlier at Wolfie’s Restaurant and Sandwich Shop in Cocoa Beach. The rapidly aging sandwich smelled terrible, and although it didn’t taste bad, it did release a small starburst of floating crumbs in the Gemini 3 spacecraft the minute Grissom bit into it. So he wrapped it back up and put it away. When the astronauts came home, the NASA contingent that expected mild misbehavior from its astronauts—which was most of NASA—had a good laugh over the prank. The contingent that fretted over even the tiniest deviation from protocol scowled, reminding all the astronauts that a mere bread crumb could snag in a switch or foul a filter and thus cause a cascade of problems that could lead to disaster.
The second time Grissom sneaked forbidden food inside a cockpit was January 22, 1967. That time the spacecraft was the new, three-man Apollo command module. Grissom’s ship was not in orbit, but on the floor of the North American Aviation plant in Downey, California, where the Apollos were getting built. And that time, the food was a lemon.
Grissom and his crewmates, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, had been spending a lot of time in their Apollo 1 in preparation for their February 21, 1967 liftoff. It would be the first flight for the new Apollo, and by all appearances, the astronauts would be flying a sweet ship—the most robust, most capable spacecraft NASA and its contractors had ever built. But the appearances were entirely misleading.
To the pilots, the Apollo felt like a slapdash machine. It was temperamental, error-prone, and impossible to work with for more than a little while before something broke down. Then a simulation would have to be halted while technicians crawled inside to fool with a faulty communications system or a dead instrument panel or a life-support component that might fail harmlessly on the ground but would kill the crew if it behaved the same way in space. Repairs were made as needed, but they were patchwork affairs—work-arounds and fixes made on top of earlier fixes, rather than the harder work of ripping out the offending systems, redesigning them and reinstalling them only when they worked right. The Mercury and Gemini spacecraft had had their design problems, but they were glitches in ships that from the beginning looked and felt sound. The Apollos—perhaps because of their complexity, or perhaps because of the rush to get astronauts on the moon before 1970, the year President Kennedy had set for the moon shot—never earned that confidence.
A disgusted Grissom would complain to the technicians, and then he’d complain to the technicians’ bosses, and then he’d complain to the NASA bosses. They would all confer among themselves and promise Gus that they would fix the problem, but still the junkyard spaceship got no better. So one day Grissom decided to make his point a different way. After another long day of trying to make the Apollo work the way it was supposed to, he climbed out of the ship and left a lemon perched atop it before walking silently away.
That Gus, the engineers said to one another with indulgent smiles. Always a little prickly.
But Grissom had a right to be a lot more than prickly. After the joint flight of Geminis 6 and 7, the space program had been moving along at just the clip NASA had planned. Between the December day when Borman and Lovell splashed down in the North Atlantic and the following November, five more Geminis had flown, one every other month, finishing up with Lovell returning to space as the commander of Gemini 12. Lovell had been joined by Buzz Aldrin, a promising rookie from the third astronaut class, and the mission had been a confidence-boosting finale for Gemini. Now all of the program’s most difficult goals—space walk, rendezvous, docking—had been performed both confidently and competently.
Well before that final spacecraft in the Gemini line returned to Earth, manufacturers had begun cutting metal for the Apollo line. Both the Mercurys and Geminis had been built by McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, and NASA liked the people there just fine. They knew what the space agency needed, delivered what had been ordered, and understood that although they might own the factory and employ the workers, NASA was both the customer and the boss.
But McDonnell couldn’t come along for Apollo. A venture this big paid factory owners well, and they would in turn hire a lot of workers from the local community. There were plenty of other manufacturers in cities all around the country, and they would all want to know why St. Louis kept finding NASA’s favor again and again.
So this time the work went to North American Aviation in Downey, California. When the contract was signed, that seemed like a perfectly suitable choice, but when the work started coming in, it seemed like something else entirely. For starters, there were the folks in what the company called the human-factors division.
Test pilots thought of a man and his plane as two discrete things. One was a deeply dumb machine that was built to do what it was told; the other was a brilliant aerialist whose job it was to tell the machine what to do. But North American Aviation didn’t see things that way. Man and machine were but two parts of the same system, and the engineers in the Downey offices believed it was their responsibility to make sure that they performed together properly.
Straight off, that presented problems, particularly for the astronauts themselves. The first pilot to bump up against North American’s new—and unwelcome—way of doing business was Frank Borman when he went off to work in the Apollo program, serving on-site in Downey as pilot liaison, and thus helping to shape the ship he and the other astronauts would be flying next.
One day, early in his time there, Borman hopped into the Apollo simulator to give it a trial spin. He was deeply displeased at what he saw.
Trying out the hand controller that fired the simulated thrusters, he realized that the engineers had designed it upside down. When he pulled back on the handle, the Apollo’s nose pointed down; when he pushed forward on it, the ship pointed up. That was exactly the opposite of the intuitive way airplanes work—and the way the Gemini spacecraft did, too.
He summoned an engineer and pointed with dissatisfaction at the offending handle. “You’ve got the polarity on this thing reversed,” he said, speaking as politely as he could, since the unsuspecting man would surely be embarrassed. “It goes down when you pull up and up when you push down.”
“Oh no, that’s the way we’re going to fly it,” the engineer responded brightly. “It makes rendezvousing easier. When you pull back on the stick, the nose goes down, but the target will seem to go up. This way it’ll be like you’re flying the target, not the spacecraft.”
Borman was speechless. First there was the man’s presumptuous use of the word “we”—as if there were any question about exactly who would be flying the spacecraft. More important, there was his apparent ignorance about how the astronauts who would be sitting in the cockpit did their work.
“You’ve got pilots who have been flying jets,” he said, just containing himself, “and that’s not the way they do it.”
“That’s the way our human-factors people say we should do it,” the man replied, seeming unmoved.
Now Borman was genuinely angry. “Well, that may be the way you’re going to do it, sitting on your rear as an engineer,” he snapped. “But that’s not the way we’re going to do it.”
Borman was doing precisely the job he was assigned to do: stop nonsense before it found its way from the brain of an engineer to the metal innards of a spacecraft. In his next call to Houston, he reported how the factory fellows wanted to design the backward thruster. Half an hour after the call, the handle was fixed.
A mere simulator, however, was not remotely the biggest problem in the Apollo factory. Everywhere in the production process, it seemed, rules were being flouted and speed was taking priority over safety. A lot of the North American engineers had learned their craft in the so-called black programs—the classified programs—of the military, which mostly involved building uncrewed vehicles, particularly satellites and missiles. It was hard work, performed to fine tolerances, but none of it involved designing systems that would have to keep a man alive. Their missiles, in particular, didn’t even have to work terribly long or terribly well; all they had to do was fly from silo to target and blow up when they were supposed to.
Word of quality control errors in the Apollo spacecraft came back to NASA headquarters with disturbing regularity, and the matter eventually found its way up to Chris Kraft, who sent his own quiet representative to the floor at Downey, a Brainbuster who could take a machine apart with his eyes and put it back together in his head so that the redesigned product was almost always better than the original. The report Kraft got back was bleak.
“This hardware is not very good,” his Brainbuster reported. “The cabling is being stepped on when they work on the spacecraft. There’s no protection for it. The people are not very good at checking this thing out. They’re not very good at trying to maintain some semblance of the fact that a human being is going to be in this machine. I’m telling you, it’s not good.”
But NASA was racing against John Kennedy’s fast-approaching deadline and a cranky Congress that was growing increasingly reluctant to fund a moon program at the same time it was pouring money into a widening war in Vietnam. The choice for the space agency seemed to be fly now or wait for perfect hardware and fly never. So despite the dismal reports and complaints from astronauts on the ground at Downey, the work went on and the spacecraft got built. To Kraft and others, their only answer was to pick a crew that inspired complete confidence, one that should be able to handle whatever their troubled spacecraft might throw at them.
Grissom was one of only a handful of men who had been in space twice. He had piloted both the Mercury and Gemini, and both times he had flown an early iteration of the spacecraft and helped wring out its problems. White had flown once, on Gemini 4 in 1965, when he made his historic space walk and displayed a remarkable steeliness throughout. The walk looked like grand fun, with pictures showing the white-suited White silhouetted against the blue of Earth and the black of space. But the twenty-three minutes outside the ship had in fact been brutal, a constant struggle against zero-g physics that made maneuvering vastly more difficult than it looked. Even getting safely back inside had proved harrowing: White’s hatch had refused to close for a full five minutes. In the end, he had to rely on sheer muscle to yank it shut, exerting himself so much that he fogged his visor completely. Chaffee, the rookie, might not have traveled in space yet, but his experience as a navy pilot proved he was coolheaded when all manner of forces were conspiring to kill him.
As a crew, the three astronauts tried to appear optimistic about their upcoming space mission, but they had no illusions about the jalopy of a ship NASA was handing them. As their launch date drew near, the space agency arranged photo sessions of the astronauts with a model of the Apollo spacecraft.
In one photograph that was never circulated to reporters, Grissom, White and Chaffee showed their true feelings about their spacecraft: they posed with their heads bowed and hands held together in prayer. Then, to make sure their message got delivered to the right people, they inscribed it to Harrison “Stormy” Storms, the North American engineer who oversaw the Apollo project. Like the rest of the top people at North American, Storms was well aware that astronauts on the factory floor were regularly making calls to NASA to report yet another problem in the Apollo spacecraft.
“Stormy,” the inscription read, “this time we’re not calling Houston!”
On January 27, 1967—five days after Grissom made the statement with his lemon and less than a month before the planned launch of Apollo 1—NASA planned to conduct what was known as a plugs-out test. The exercise would begin when a fully suited crew climbed inside their spacecraft, which was already on the pad and mounted on top of its Saturn 1B booster rocket. With the spacecraft operating on its own internal power system, the crew and the controllers would perform a dress rehearsal of the launch sequence.
Two more steps would ensure as much launch-day authenticity as possible. The first involved the Apollo’s atmosphere, an environment with high internal pressure, which was made up of 100-percent oxygen, as it would be in orbit, instead of the 33-percent-oxygen, 77-percent-nitrogen mix of Earth’s atmosphere. Since humans need only the oxygen to stay alive, designers decided not to outfit the spacecraft with tanks of inert nitrogen, since that would merely add weight. If anyone was concerned about the fact that fire loves oxygen—especially pure, high-pressure oxygen—that concern did not cause NASA to halt the test.
The second authentic condition involved the hatch, which, once the astronauts were on their backs and in their seats, was directly behind them, over White’s head. In the event of an emergency, Grissom, White and Chaffee would be best served by a hatch they could open in a hurry. That would allow them to tumble out of the ship onto the floor of the white room, the little work space at the end of a swing arm at the top of the gantry tower. The white room surrounded the Apollo when the ship was on the pad, and swung back out of the way before liftoff. An easy-open hatch, however, would not be suitable for a cockpit with so much internal pressure. For that, engineers designed a double hatch—an inner one and outer one—and sealed it with multiple latches. If a pad emergency occurred, the man in the center seat would open the latches with a ratchet and then detach the inner hatch, pull it in and lay it down on the floor. Only then could he open the outer hatch. The commander, in the left-hand seat, would assist if needed. The Apollo 1 astronauts had practiced this sequence many times, and no matter how hard or efficiently they worked, it took time.
The night before the plugs-out test, Wally Schirra, who was Grissom’s backup for this mission, went out to the launchpad with Grissom and spent some time inside the spacecraft, running a few final tests. When he climbed out, he shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said to Grissom. “There’s nothing I can point to, but something about this ship just doesn’t ring right.”
It was a damning judgment for a pilot to deliver, suggesting a vehicle that didn’t have discrete, fixable problems, but sweeping systemic ones.
And then Schirra added a warning: “If you have any problems, I’d get out.”
The plugs-out test at last began at 2:50 p.m., after the crew had settled into their seats and the double hatch had been closed and sealed. The exercise ran slowly and haltingly. The day’s most nettlesome problem was one that had occurred in earlier tests, too: balky communications. White and Chaffee could make out the transmissions coming through their headsets, but only through a storm of static and with a lot of dropped words. Grissom’s communications line, for reasons the engineers couldn’t seem to discover, was even worse.
Before the exercise began, Deke Slayton had offered to climb into the ship along with the crew and spend the entirety of the test period in the lower equipment bay—the small workspace beneath the foot of the couches—to see if he could solve the communications problem. But the plugs-out test was supposed to be as authentic as possible, and since there wouldn’t be four men jammed into the three-man ship on launch day, there wouldn’t be four men today, either. Instead, Slayton stayed in the launch control center at the Cape, listening as best he could to the garbled communications coming down from the ship.
At 6:20 p.m., an exhausted crew and the exhausted ground teams working at both Cape Kennedy in Florida and Mission Control in Houston got a short break as the simulated countdown went into what was supposed to be a ten-minute hold while the communications breakdown and other glitches were addressed. Kraft, who had been shuttling back and forth between Mission Control in Houston and his nearby office as the countdown started and stopped throughout the afternoon, was now back at his console at the rear of the control room, listening to both the chatter on the ground and the transmissions from the spacecraft.
“How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t even talk between three buildings?” Grissom groused at just a few seconds shy of 6:30 p.m. It was one of the rare moments his voice got through clearly.
“They can’t hear a thing you’re sayin’,” White said, his tone bemused.
One minute and fourteen seconds later, the people on the ground did hear something the crew was saying. What they heard was Chaffee shouting, “Hey!”
Next they heard White screaming: “Fire! We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”
Then they heard Chaffee shouting: “We have a bad fire!”
And finally they heard Chaffee again, this time screaming: “We’re burning up!”
In the white room, the technicians could see frenzied motion through the spacecraft windows. They also saw the flickering light of what was unmistakably a fire.
“Get them out of there!” yelled Donald Babbitt, the pad leader and the chief of the white room. The men around him leapt toward the spacecraft and began wrestling frantically with the hatch. Intense heat radiating from the metal hull forced them to turn their faces to avoid the full power of it.
As the noise and frenzy in the white room increased, the transmission from the spacecraft became ominously still. Now the voices in the headsets of the men in the control rooms were filled only with the words of the launch controllers themselves—shouting questions to one another at the Cape, staying silent in Houston, where they could do nothing.
“Crew egress!” called the lead test conductor in the launch, following the book and telling the crew to do what they could not possibly do, which was to get out of a spacecraft that had just become a furnace.
“Blow the hatch!” shouted a communications technician nearby. “Why don’t they blow the hatch?”
In the white room, one more voice rang out, though no one ever knew whose it was. “Clear the level!” the person called. He was using the agreed-upon language to order all of the people outside the ship to back away—or, if possible, to run away—because the spacecraft was in danger of exploding.
Moments later, the Apollo gave off a sound and a blast of air like a bomb, showering the white room with flaming debris and setting fire to loose papers on clipboards and desks. Inside the spacecraft, the fire rushed toward the freedom of the opening, completely engulfing the astronauts. There would be no surviving that; the crew was lost.
Kraft heard every word the dying men said. Slayton—who was sitting at a console, not folded up in the equipment bay of the burning ship—heard it all, too, as did every other man in two control centers. But no one would ever be able to agree on exactly what the astronauts’ final words were. Even when recordings of the last few seconds of the men’s lives were played, different people remembered hearing different things that the tape didn’t capture, which was entirely possible given the unreliability of the communication system.
What many of the men insisted they heard, even though the tape didn’t capture it, was one of the astronauts—a professional pilot to the last, a man who knew that as long as you are able to communicate with your flight controllers, you must keep them apprised of the condition of your ship—say as levelly as the circumstances would allow, “I’m reporting a bad fire.” The report would be duly noted.
NASA announced the death of the men within the hour, and the networks preempted Friday evening programming with regular reports on the accident at the Cape. The space agency reassured the public that Grissom, White and Chaffee had died almost instantly; though only a small consolation, that was still a mercy. But the official story wasn’t true: the three men had lived for a long time as these things go—at least twenty-one seconds, judging by the biometric readings and the activity in the ship that the technicians in the white room had seen through the windows, as well as the data recorded by the spacecraft’s motion detectors.
For twenty-one seconds, the astronauts knew what was happening to them and fought to save themselves. To anyone at NASA who had been paying attention, the deaths of Grissom, Chaffee and White were not accidents but inevitabilities—equal parts tragedy and disgrace.
Gene Kranz, one of NASA’s top flight directors, had become one of the most recognized workhorses at the main console in Mission Control. On January 27, the night of the Apollo 1 plugs-out test, however, Kranz had left the space center early, having gone home for a long-overdue dinner out he’d promised his wife, Marta, who had recently had their third child and was looking forward to a free evening. As he was getting ready, he heard a pounding at the front door. Expecting the babysitter, he frowned at the excessive noise. Still half-dressed, he hurried downstairs and opened the door to see his neighbor, Jim Hannigan, a deputy director of the space center’s lunar module division.
“There’s been an accident at the Cape,” Hannigan said without preamble. “I heard it on the radio. They think the crew is dead.”
Kranz tore upstairs, got back into his work clothes and told Marta what he knew. Then he ran out to his car and raced to the campus of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center. When an out-of-breath Kranz at last entered Mission Control, the scene there chilled him.
At the center console was Kraft, talking in low tones to the flight surgeon at the Cape. Near him was John Hodge, chief of the flight control division. They both looked grim, but nowhere near as much as the pale and shaken younger men at the other consoles. Kranz had flown in combat, and both he and Hodge had worked in test flight, and so both men knew what death looked like.
The junior men in the room had had no such training, no such toughening. Kranz and the other senior figures in the room put the younger men back to work, instructing them to secure their consoles so that every switch and dial remained in exactly the position it was when the fire struck. Somewhere in those thousands of settings might be critical information that would be needed in the investigation to follow—and there would surely be an investigation.
The weekend that followed the fire was nearly unbearable, not least because most of the Mission Control team had nothing to do until Monday except think about what had happened at the Cape on Friday. But when Monday morning finally arrived, the controllers—bleary-eyed or not, sleepless or not—were expected back at work. When they got there, Kranz was ready for them. He and Hodge called a meeting in the main auditorium in Building 30 on the Manned Spacecraft Center grounds, and attendance was mandatory.
When the controllers took their seats, Hodge spoke first. He talked about what had been learned over the past couple of days; thus far, only a little was known about either the fire’s source or the extensive underlying problems in the spacecraft. He announced the names of the men who had initially been assigned to the investigation team, and he talked a bit about how much time would be needed until flights could resume. He conceded that he had no idea if the long-standing deadline for a lunar landing was realistic anymore, but he assured his audience that the NASA administrators would make every effort to come as close as possible to landing on the moon by 1970. Then he turned the stage over to his colleague.
Kranz had spent his weekend thinking hard and getting angry, and he wasn’t about to waste an opportunity to drive home a lesson that had come at a tragically high cost. Too often in the previous months, he told the silent controllers, potential problems had been dismissed with a casual that-can’t-happen wave. Maybe the ship had a balky breaker, but it would never cause a fuel cell to fail in flight. Maybe those new pyrotechnics were a little temperamental, but they could never cause a parachute to fail to deploy. And as for pumping pure oxygen into the cockpit, it had never caused any problems before, had it?
But what if it did? What would you do then? These were the critical questions no one had been raising. It was not good enough to ask what would you accept. Instead, you had to ask what action you would take today to prevent the failure from ever happening. The answer you gave should always satisfy one final question: what is the very best thing to do in this situation?
Kranz made it very clear to the men in the Houston auditorium that the best thing to do was not what had been done in the months leading up to the deaths on Friday. Not a person in the room—himself included—had been tough enough. Every one of them had seen one or more of the problems the Apollo spacecraft had been having; everyone had heard the stories about the wreck that was rolling off the lines at North American Aviation. And not one of them had stepped forward and spoken up.
“We had the opportunity to call it off,” Kranz said sharply. “We had the opportunity to say, ‘This isn’t right. Let’s shut it down.’ And none of us did.”
With enough smarts and enough skill, Kranz told them, no mission ever had a reason to fail. It might have problems; it might not achieve every one of its goals. But failure, in all its abject awfulness, cannot be on the menu of possibilities.
“From this day forward,” he said, “we will stand for doing everything right, literally being perfect and competent.”
Kranz turned to the blackboard behind him and wrote the words “tough and competent.” Then he turned back to his young charges.
“I want every one of you to go back to your offices and write those words on the top of your own blackboards,” he ordered. “You are not to erase them until we’ve put a man on the moon.”
With that, he put down his chalk, turned on his heel and left the stage. The lesson was over.
The news of the deaths of the three astronauts came to Frank Borman the same way it had come to Gene Kranz: with a knock at the door. Borman, Susan and their boys were staying at a friend’s cabin on a lake in Huntsville, Texas, and they were just starting into a long weekend that would at last give Borman a break from the Apollo race. The quest to get the ship off the pad only three months after the last Gemini spacecraft flew had been exhausting, and the prelaunch stretch to come promised only to be worse.
The knock on the cabin door that Friday evening was not remotely expected. Borman opened the door to find a Texas Ranger or highway patrolman—he couldn’t tell exactly which.
“Colonel Borman?” the officer asked.
“That’s me,” Borman said.
“I have word from the space center. You’re to call Mr. Slayton immediately.”
Borman thanked the man and hurried to the phone. He knew even before Slayton answered that the news could not possibly be good, but what the chief astronaut told him was far worse than he had imagined. Borman closed his eyes and felt his stomach drop out; for a moment he could say nothing at all. He would grieve for Grissom and Chaffee, but he would bleed for his friend Ed White. Borman did not give his friendship easily, and now he barely knew what to do with the loss.
He found his voice. “How did it happen, Deke? What went wrong?”
“We don’t know,” Slayton said. “But you’re on the team that’s going to investigate this thing. Be at the Cape tomorrow morning.”
Borman agreed, hung up the phone and quietly told Susan and the boys what Slayton had just told him. They packed hurriedly and drove back to Houston; without even stopping at their own home, they pulled up across the street from the Whites’ house, finding a space to park wherever they could among the astronaut sports cars and government sedans that were already crowding the curb. They went inside—no need to knock today, just as there was never a need to knock when an astronaut was in space and the family’s home was filled with well-wishers around the clock, serving the cake and sandwiches and coffee during the day and the casserole and potato salad in the evenings. On those bright, busy days, everyone would be walking the wire between excitement and terror, a balancing act that would last until splashdown.
But tonight, terror had won. The feared thing had happened and the people in the room showed it: they were drawn and hollow-eyed, subdued and deeply sorrowful. Susan rushed to Pat, who was surrounded by the wives, and they embraced like sisters. Borman joined the astronaut cluster, exchanging grim nods and murmured condolences. The government people, in their own small group, spoke in the low and purposeful tones they used when working at something important. And what they were working on right now were the funerals. That, from what Borman could hear, was also what Pat was talking about with Susan—when she could work her words through her hitching breath.
The decision had already been made that all three astronauts would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery sometime next week, just as John Kennedy had been buried there a little more than three years before. It was precisely the kind of honor the men deserved, except that Ed White wanted nothing to do with Arlington, Kennedy or not. Like his father, White had been a West Point man, and more than once he had made it clear to Pat that since he had learned to be a soldier and taken his commission at the academy, he wanted to be buried there if he lost his life in the race for space. Washington, however, had decided there would be just one funeral for the entire crew; it was neater that way, especially since President Lyndon Johnson planned to attend.
Susan summoned Borman and told him of the problem. Pat pleaded with him to set things right. He nodded.
“Ed will be buried at West Point,” he promised Pat.
“But they said there could be only one service,” she responded.
“There will be two,” he said.
Then he walked to the government men, asked for the phone number of whichever protocol office had dispatched them here and dialed it with a jabbing finger.
“This is Frank Borman,” he said when the man answered. “I’m at Ed White’s house. It is his family’s wishes that he be buried at West Point.”
The man began to protest, explaining that the Arlington arrangements were already being made.
“I don’t care,” Borman said. “Ed will be buried at West Point as the family wants. Now go make those arrangements, because that is what is going to happen.”
He hung up the phone, leaving it rattling in its receiver. Borman would be at the Cape in the morning as ordered, but later in the week he would be traveling to West Point to help carry his friend to his grave.
Not long after Borman arrived at the Cape, he visited the launchpad and climbed inside the ruined Apollo. The spacecraft was still perched atop its rocket to nowhere and from a distance, in the right light, the bright white ghost ship still looked ready to fly someplace grand.
By now, the bodies had been removed and sent off to the medical examiner’s office. Yet there wouldn’t be much of an examination: it was already clear that the men had died not of burns, but of suffocation. The fire had flashed through too fast to have consumed much of the cloth of their suits, but the smoke and the fumes from a thousand melting materials would have been impossible to survive for long.
Grissom had been found partly in his left-hand couch and partly slumped under White’s in the center, suggesting that when he died he was performing his part in the evacuation drill by leaning over to assist White as he tried to open the latches on the hatch. White died in his own couch doing that work, with one arm dropped across his face as if he were trying to protect himself from the poisonous smoke that had filled the ship. Chaffee, too, was still in his seat; his assignment would have been to maintain radio contact with the ground throughout the escape, the likely reason his voice was heard first.
By the time Borman climbed inside, a plastic drop cloth had been hung over the instrument panel and spread on the seats, keeping the death scene pristine until the plastic could be rolled back bit by bit during the mechanical autopsy to come. It would be an exceedingly painstaking job.
The deconstruction would go on for several months. Ultimately, the work would reveal the precise sequence of small, avoidable problems that had led to the tragedy on the launchpad.
At precisely 6:31 p.m. on the night of the fire, a spark had jumped from a wire on the far left of the spacecraft, beneath Gus Grissom’s seat. The wire ran beneath a little storage compartment with a metal door that had been opened and closed many times without anybody noticing that each time the door moved, it wore away a little more of the wire’s insulation, finally leaving the wire free to spark at will. When the wire sparked during the plugs-out test, it ignited a small fire that stayed small only for a second or two. Accelerated by the pure oxygen, the flames climbed along the left-hand wall of the spacecraft, feeding on fabric and netting used for storage. That wall was the worst possible place for a fire to erupt since it prevented Grissom from reaching a latch that would have opened a valve and vented the high-pressure atmosphere, thus slowing the flames.
Unimpeded, the fire proceeded to consume anything around it that would burn—the paper of the flight plans, the cloth of the seats, the Velcro and plastic and rubber that were everywhere. It fed on the space suits of the men themselves, spreading over Grissom and toward White, who by now was struggling with the hopeless ratchet and the locked-tight hatch. As the temperature climbed inside the ship, the pressure soared, causing a weak spot on the floor on the far right of the cabin to do what the person who shouted “Clear the level!” feared, which was to rupture.
The explosion ripped apart not only the doomed spacecraft, but all the plans NASA had so carefully drawn for its steady march to the moon. The astronauts would be mourned by the nation, the space agency would be condemned by the press and both houses of Congress would investigate the accident and issue scalding reports. To no one’s surprise, NASA indefinitely suspended all planned flights of the Apollo spacecraft.
Only when the deconstruction of the accident was complete did Borman move on to the real job he had in the investigation, which was to go out to Downey to work on the factory floor. Appointed by NASA administrator Jim Webb and Deke Slayton, Borman was the astronauts’ chief representative and advocate, which kept him away from home for even longer stretches than usual. It was far too late in the game to sack North American Aviation and start over with a new contractor. Instead, the place would have to be reformed.
Wally Schirra was on-site, too, but in a sense, he wasn’t there at all—not the real Wally at least. As the commander of Apollo 1’s backup crew, Schirra figured that he had a bigger stake than anyone else in making sure the spacecraft got fixed, which meant that the jolly Wally everyone knew was nowhere to be seen.
“You roasted three men in that thing already,” he would snap at anyone on the floor at Downey who objected to interference from an astronaut. “You’re not going to roast me.”
But through it all, the Apollo spacecraft was slowly being redesigned and rebuilt. The wiring was rewoven; the hatch was replaced with a new model that could be opened by one person in seconds; the flammable Velcro was eliminated. Every shred of ordinary paper was replaced by fireproof paper, and every scrap of ordinary cloth was replaced by fireproof beta cloth. Combustible coolant was replaced, soldered joints were reworked, vibrational tests were improved and the 100-percent-oxygen atmosphere used on the pad was replaced by a nitrogen-oxygen mix. Every single step in the quality control and checkout processes was also rethought and redrafted.
Most important, the engineers and the human-factors people at North American would never again be allowed to slip the leash of the space agency.
“Nobody’s going to put anything in the spacecraft unless NASA management approves it,” said Borman—who as far as North American was concerned was NASA management.
And nobody ever did.